When life hands you lemons - use your garlic smasher!

 I have been trying to be better about making my menu's and having a grocery list ready to go that will work with my menu's as of late.  I am limiting time in the grocery store and I am down to about once about every 10 days most of the time.  Sh*t happens though and we sometimes have to go more, but for the most part we're keeping it down.  One of the things always on the list are lemons.  We use a ton of them!

There above you can see a couple in the bowl and one on the counter that I have used a bit of the zest from.

I have a few lemon/rind "zesters", but they all take forever and really are a pain to work with and actually get the zest out of the holes and the tool.  Just a pain!

The one you see above with the green is a Microplaner that works great for some things but for lemon and lime zest it just falls a little short.  The silver thing that looks like it belongs in a ladies doctor office is actually a fantastic garlic smasher!  It's my favorite Pampered Chef item of all time and I have two of them - identical!

So I was making a recipe of "Ale Sauced Pork and Veggies" and it calls for a tablespoon of fine lemon zest.  I didn't have time for all the work it took for the zesting part as I had forgotten about the  recipe and had to do it quickly so it could marinate overnight before going in the crock pot the next morning - it was already late on a work night!  The recipe isn't mine so I have included the link above (click on the recipe name) so you can get it if you would like!

You an see the lemon peel slivers on the cutting board in between the smasher handles.  It takes a lot of slicing and dicing to get fine lemon peel when the microplaner won't do the job.....

Enter the garlic smasher!

If a recipe calls for three cloves of garlic we use 6.  Just sayin!  In the above photo you can see a clove of garlic in the smasher.  I took part of the lemon peel that I had knife cut off the lemon and was chopping and I just put it in the garlic smasher with the cloves of garlic.
Then I smashed away and just scraped the whole lot into the bag with the meat!  It worked perfectly!  The lemon rind smashed through just like garlic does and was a really fine texture.  I did run just lemon peel through to see if it would work without the garlic - it does!  All Good!

There it is in all its deliciousness in the bag!  Ready to marinate.  This recipe calls for pork riblets or some such thing, but I had a bag of what we call "pork stew ends" which is really just trim from our pork roasts that we cut and freeze, so there was a bit of that fatty pork and some bits that might not otherwise get used.  This recipe is no worries for any meat that might be tough - I think it would work fine with beef as well.

Yes - I used Alaska Amber beer in my recipe.  Totally worth it - and it was taking up some valuable shelf space in the pantry that I needed for olive oil!  Kind of kidding there - but Amber is a good beer to drink or cook with.

Here it is ready for the meat to be poured on top and cook away while I work!  I did also add onion to the recipe - not sure who would make a recipe with pork, potatoes and carrots and no onions - regardless if it has beer!  Definitely not an Irish or a Scot!  Still all good and this recipe is delicious!  It's like a stew for sure - make you some Hard Lemon Biscuits to serve with it (aka 7-up Biscuits)!

My point is that the garlic smasher saves the day and makes life easier all the way around!

I hope you have one to make your day!  I encourage you to use the tools you have in new ways to solve the worlds problems - even if it is just how to zest lemon quickly!

Be well and Blessed Be!